Securing Your Visitors’ Information

Anytime you’re transacting personal information online, security is always an issue. As the owner of a website that requires users to share personal and financial information, such as when purchasing products, ensuring your customers’ safety should be one of your primary concerns.  After all, who’s going to deal with a website that doesn’t put much care into protecting their sensitive information?

Encryption

The simplest way to ensure the safety of your visitors’ information is to install a layer of encryption to all the information you’re going to transmit.  Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is the most popular encryption protocol used in the web.  When a website uses SSL, any data the user types in the browser is encrypted through a key known only to the source website.  All data transmitted both going and leaving the user’s web browser is encrypted using this key, rendering it unreadable to prying eyes.

Transport Layer Security (TSL), on the other hand, is considered as the successor to SSL and requires the exchanging parties (the website and the browser) to negotiate both the algorithm and cryptographic keys to be used for encryption before data is exchanged.  The setup is a bit more complex than SSL but is also considered more secure.

Certificates

A certificate is required to be able to utilize either SSL or TLS as security protocols for your site.  Some web hosting providers offer encryption certificates as part of their cheap hosting packages (most likely a certificate you will share with a few other websites) while others will require you to pay an extra amount to install it.  Verisign is the largest issuer of encryption certificates (you’ve probably seen their name when you’re buying anything online) and you can visit their website to learn more about what they do.  There are other security providers, though, most of which should be listed with WhichSSL.